Cassia, a partnership between husband and wife duos Bryant & Kim Ng and Josh Loeb & Zoe Nathan is organising the first charity dinner called LA Chefs for Human Rights at their restaurant in Los Angeles, California. The new movement that has just launched aims to raise funds for the Programme for Torture victims in its first event that will be organised on 10 October. The event will feature chefs like Nancy Silverton of Osteria Mozza, Niki Nakayama of n/naka, Ray Garcia of Broken Spanish and Zoe Nathan from the Rustic Canyon Family of Restaurants. It is already sold out. Chefs worldwide are nowadays using their influence and status to help raise awareness on issues of global importance. Only recently, thousands of restaurants pledged to support the earthquake struck Italian village of Amatrice by donating a part of every Spaghetti Amatriciana they served in their restaurants worldwide to help rebuild the city. The restaurant Cassia in Los Angeles takes roots from … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2016
Benoit Nihant opens second chocolate store in Brussels
10 years after opening his first boutique shop, Benoît Nihant, the bean to bar Belgian chocolatier, has opened his second shop in Brussels in the Fort Jaco area in Uccle. The elegant store, which opened in August was officially inaugurated last week and marks a shift from the more classic store in Ixelles with its modern lines and white, black and gold colours. The large photos which adorn the shop show you part of the process to turn cocoa beans into the end product. Known as the bean to bar process, this Belgian chocolatier, who has his workshop in Awans, close to the Belgian city of Liege, has been producing his own chocolate from the beans he procures for the past six years. Benoit Nihant is one of only very few chocolate makers worldwide who starts his chocolate making process buying his beans directly from different plantations worldwide. He has recently also invested in his own plantation in Peru. In an interview with Food and Wine Gazette he had said it was not an easy … [Read more...]
Weekly roundup of great reads on food and wine #88
Why Are So Many Great NYC Restaurants Closing? It’s Not Just The Rent: It’s happening all over New York City, to restaurants big and small, from acclaimed pioneers, like WD-50, Union Square Café, Telepan, the Campbell Apartment and the Four Seasons, to more humble and beloved spots, like Bianca, Hamilton’s and Brooklyn Fish Camp. All shuttered or packing up because the rent is due and it’s too damn high. How high? The Seagram Building’s owner, RFR Holding, is said to have wanted to raise the Four Seasons’ annual rent to a market rate of $3.7 million from $784,000. Mark Grossich, who took over the Campbell Apartment space 17 years ago, was paying $350,000 a year and offered to pay his landlord, the MTA, $800,000 per year to save his bar. Not enough. Nightlife guru Scott Gerber made a bid for $1.1 million a year, and after a contentious lawsuit with the MTA, Gerber got the deal. Union Square Café’s rent was tripled. No credit for making the neighborhood great in the first … [Read more...]
11 tips on how to avoid a tourist trap
If you travel to any major city or tourist destination in the world, you are bound to encounter more tourist traps than you can handle. And while you might be smug to think that you will be able to spot a tourist trap once you see one, this is not so evident in places which are extremely busy with tourists and which have a bad reputation when it comes to food. Places which welcome many tourists each day are bound to take many short-cuts including with the quality of the produce they serve. Although online crowd-sourcing guides such as Tripadvisor or Yelp may serve as a deterrent compared to the past, they cannot always be relied upon. When you have no control of time on a trip, then you need to be particularly careful if you want to eat well since you might not have time to book a restaurant before hand. That was very much in evidence on a recent very short trip to Venice. While it has a bad reputation when it comes to food, particularly because of the large amount of tourists … [Read more...]
Alain Passard: My garden saved my life – (Chef’s Table review)
Alain Passard is considered to be an idol by many chefs. Three Michelin star chef of restaurant Arpège in Paris, France, he is mainly known for inventing the vegetable to table movement removing meat from his restaurant and serving a cuisine that is mainly focused on seasonal vegetables. Passard has been working with a mainly vegetarian menu at his restaurant since 2001. Although he decided to be a chef at 14 and says he's never changed his mind, he did realise that he no longer wanted to work with meat. His story is beautifully depicted in the first episode of Chef's Table France, the third season of the successful foodie series just released by Netflix. In this documentary directed by David Gelb, Passard speaks about the influence his grandmother had on him and says he can still hear the whistle of the oven when she was cooking with fire. "Her cooking smelled good, it was generous. She had a delicate sense of cooking. I have her recipes but I have never been able to cook as … [Read more...]
Food for thought at the Antwerp à la carte exhibition
Did you know that one third of all food produced in the world each year gets wasted? That is 1.3 billion tonnes. Did you know that it takes to make a litre of beer, it takes 75 litres of water, a kilo of coffee 140 litres of water, 1 kilo of eggs 3,300 litres of water, 1 kilo of wheat 1,ooo litres of water and 1 kg of beef 16,000 litres of water? You can learn about food at the very interesting Antwerp à la carte exhibition on the 5th floor of the MAS museum in the city of Antwerp. The exhibition promises to give you a tasty history of the city but it also opens your eyes to some of the most important contemporary issues relating to food. As you enter the exhibition space, you will be provoked by an art installation by Thomas Rentmeister which depicts a supermarket shopping trolley nearly completely covered in sugar. That's a provocation about the amount of sugar we find in processed products we buy from supermarkets nowadays but it is also eye-opening. How do we feed the … [Read more...]